RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard disk drives that function together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is divided into separate ones using virtualization software. In either case, the same info is saved on all the drives and the basic advantage of using such a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also enhances the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

All content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue working efficiently until the faulty drive is changed and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is cloned to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID breaks down as the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one right away without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we set up virtual private servers function in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the information which will be copied on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the right information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable Internet hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any type of unexpected hardware failure.